Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews

by Lionel Barber

  When Sobchak reaches our table, she flags down a waiter and orders herself a pot of tea and a mint-flavoured hookah. Next, she turns to me and asks curtly, in Russian, how long this is going to take. I remind her we are here to share a meal and she brightens considerably. ‘Well, let’s order something to eat!’

  We settle on starters – cucumber and tomato salad for her, tuna tartare for me – and we both pick the sea bass, Sobchak’s favourite, as entrée. I am anxious to pin down her apparent transformation from Russia’s Kim Kardashian to its Christiane Amanpour. Is, I ask, the new Ksenia Sobchak for real?

  ‘Why was I going around in rhinestones before, and am now wearing a plaid shirt and glasses?’ she muses with mock seriousness. ‘It’s not a question of fashion. It’s a question of time and yourself. The country changed, I grew up, life changed. It’s normal.’

  Yet for much of the country she represents a group that got filthy rich as the rest starved, and then rubbed it in their faces. In 2003, for example, talking to the New York Times, she bemoaned the need to shuttle between ‘home, the car, the health club, entertainment’ to avoid ordinary people. ‘You go out on the street and it’s dirty,’ she explained. ‘There are people and their envy. It’s a lot of negative energy.’

  Sobchak admits that, in retrospect, she would ‘probably do differently’ the previous 10 years of publicly chronicled partying and debauchery. But she is unapologetic about how she got to where she is. ‘I wanted to become a star, of course. That was very important to me. I wanted to achieve something,’ she says.

  Did that have anything to do with being known for something besides her famous father, the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg? ‘Probably.’

  Sobchak’s recent transition is further complicated by her family background. In the 1990s, her father appointed the future president Putin as his deputy, essentially paving the way for the latter’s political career. Anatoly was once spoken of as a future president himself, and events surrounding his sudden death in 2000 are still disputed. However, Sobchak and her mother, Lyudmila, a pro-Kremlin MP, have retained close ties with Putin, with some media reports claiming that Putin is Sobchak’s godfather – something she denies.

  For sceptics, it is one of the absurdities of Russia’s ‘revolution of the satisfied’ that anti-government protests in Moscow are being championed by a rich, Kremlin-connected socialite. Yet the reasons she cites for joining the movement, such as wanting a vibrant civil society to develop in Russia, are hard to fault. She declares that fighting for honest regional elections and calling for an early Moscow mayoral vote will be her main objectives in the autumn.

  Despite all this, Sobchak insists she is not one of the movement’s leaders. ‘To present me as the main face of the opposition movement is completely incorrect,’ she says. ‘I’m not a person who is “against Putin”. I’m just a person who is standing up for a fair society, for free elections. If Putin can do this, I think it would be the ideal scenario for everyone because there won’t be any revolution or any protests.’

  It is this type of assertion, with its suggestion that Sobchak is willing to enjoy the political limelight while still trying to retain special immunity, that riles other protesters.

  I ask her a question that has been bugging Kremlinologists this past year: is it possible for Putin to change? ‘Maybe yes, maybe no. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And it doesn’t depend on me.’

  At this point, her mobile rings. She spends the next five minutes simultaneously discussing the details of an upcoming magazine party at Tverbul and stabbing at her tomato and cucumber salad, which has arrived along with my tuna tartare.

  The salad and the phone call finished, we move on to murkier matters, specifically a police raid on Sobchak’s apartment in early June. Newspaper accounts of the events that morning read like an extract from a Jackie Collins novel. At 8am on a Monday, a bleary-eyed Sobchak wearing only a negligee opened the door to about 20 armed policemen (she thought it was the cleaning lady). Inside the apartment, the police found not only her boyfriend, opposition leader Ilya Yashin, but more than €1m in cash, reportedly divided into 121 different envelopes.

  The cash has understandably raised some questions, which Sobchak has answered to varying degrees of satisfaction. Tonight she says, ‘In a country where there is so much instability, I believed it was advisable to keep my cash at home. I think it’s the only way to feel safe here.’

  But why so many envelopes? ‘I’m not going to answer that question because I have my own tactics,’ she replies cryptically. ‘Yes, there were envelopes, but not as many as they said and not with those sums of money. It was quite a lot of money but what’s the problem with keeping money in envelopes? What else are you supposed to keep it in – socks?’

  I am briefly entertained by the thought of Sobchak keeping her money in a hundred cashmere socks, when, taking a long drag from her hookah, she accidentally drops the pipe and shatters her teacup.

  ‘Bring me a new cup, will you please?’ she asks the waiter, without batting an eyelid. A new cup is immediately fetched and, soon after, our sea bass arrives, white and tender, with grilled tomatoes and rocket salad on the side.

  As we navigate the bones, Sobchak more deftly than I, we delve further into her recent police encounter, which appears to have taken her unawares.

  Did she really not think that, after becoming a prominent figure in the opposition movement, she would be exposed to any number of charges, fictitious or otherwise?

  ‘I didn’t kill someone or call for a siege on the Kremlin,’ she counters.

  But this doesn’t mean they can’t arrest you, I say. Take Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the tycoon imprisoned on tax evasion charges in 2003 – shortly after speaking out against Putin – and who is due to stay in jail until 2017.

  Sobchak disagrees. ‘Khodorkovsky absolutely broke the law,’ she claims. But, she admits, ‘he is not sitting in jail for the reason they arrested him’.

  Many believe she will prove no more than a fair-weather friend to the protest movement. While most protesters end their public pronouncements with chants of ‘We will win!’ she is more measured. ‘There is a big possibility that if the political leaders don’t find a forum for joining together, the political will of the movement will drain out,’ she says bluntly.

  The movement, which has coalesced around a ragtag group of activists, among them the blogger Alexei Navalny and radical leftist Sergei Udaltsov, has planned its first big rally since June for 15 September, a protest that will incorporate new grievances, such as the Pussy Riot jailing, and will focus on regional elections. At the same time pressure is being applied to various protesters, including Navalny and Gennady Gudkov, an opposition Duma deputy, both of whom face criminal charges for business dealings. Navalny, Udaltsov and Sobchak are also being questioned over their involvement in a May protest that turned violent – the pretext for the police raiding the apartments of Sobchak and others.

  When Sobchak speaks about how the past six months have strained her relationship with her politician mother she goes suddenly quiet.

  ‘She is in a difficult situation,’ she finally begins. ‘On the one hand, she is my mother. On the other hand, she is a person who is loyal to the system.’

  Would her father, I ask, support the regime in its current state? She looks as if she might cry. ‘No, I think he would definitely not be able to be part of this system.’

  She is more upbeat when it comes to her own fate, almost naively so given the circumstances. ‘I’ve studied a lot of psychology. I’m religious. With situations that you have no power over, there is no point in worrying about one thing or another,’ she says simply. ‘Why think about things that you can’t control?’ It seems like the statement of someone who has grown accustomed to thinking that when one teacup is broken, a new one will appear.

  Her phone rings again. It is Yashin – the Che Guevara to her Eva Perón. She has a request: she does not want me to write about the
ir relationship. ‘Everything about me has already been written, published, smeared everywhere. Enough is enough,’ she says.

  Supper with a serious financial publication seems an odd place to make such a declaration, but I decide to let it slide. Instead, I mumble that it must be hard having all these famous relationships and famous boyfriends. I am thinking not just of Yashin but of the Moscow official with whom she turned up at her first protest and whom she later dumped; as well as of a handsome Russian-American businessman who was, briefly, her fiancé.

  Sobchak gently corrects me. ‘I don’t think they were that famous until they started going out with me,’ she says sweetly.

  A few minutes later we get the bill and after a minute of back-and-forth, Sobchak agrees to let the FT pay at her restaurant. She is, thanks to the raid, down €1m, after all.

  She gathers her things to go. When I remain sitting, she asks if I am planning to stay. I remind her that I am still waiting for my card. ‘Oh! I’ll wait!’ she says.

  Thirty seconds later I can tell she is getting restless, and tell her again to go ahead. This time she agrees.

  ‘You’re a really pretty girl!’ she exclaims, apropos of nothing.

  It is her parting political shot, and she is off into the Moscow sunset. For Sobchak, the show goes on.

  TVERBUL

  24 Tverskoy Bulvar, Moscow

  * * *

  cucumber and tomato salad Rbs390

  tuna tartare Rbs750

  2 × steamed sea bass Rbs2,400

  strawberry lemonade Rbs380

  tea mint hookah gratis Rbs600

  * * *

  Total Rbs4,520 (£90)

  * * *

  Politics

  29 MAY 2009

  Bao Tong

  ‘Tanks were roaring and bullets flying’

  20 years on from the Tiananmen massacre, the former Communist party official is still under house arrest

  By Jamil Anderlini

  When China’s ubiquitous state security agents want to intimidate a dissident or political activist for the first time, they usually come knocking in the middle of the night with an invitation for ‘a cup of tea’. Once the tea is served in some secret location, the agents explain that if their guest continues publicly to criticize Communist party rule, the likely consequences range from unemployment to long prison sentences or even ‘disappearance’ for them, their family and friends.

  So it seems somehow fitting that Bao Tong, the most senior Communist party official to be jailed as a consequence of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, should have invited me to tea at his apartment in the west of Beijing.

  It was 20 years ago next week, on 3 and 4 June 1989, that the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peaceful student protesters and bystanders. As the anniversary of the bloody crackdown approaches, Bao, now 77, remains under house arrest, his apartment watched around the clock and his movements tightly restricted by state security officers. I’d originally invited him for lunch at a restaurant but, as he patiently explained, under the terms of his house arrest it would be more convenient to meet in his home.

  He greets me at the door with a wry smile, jet-black hair and a lithe frame wrapped in a Princeton University sweatshirt. It is hard to believe that he spent six years of his life doing hard labour during the Cultural Revolution and then, from 1989, another seven years in solitary confinement in the notorious Qincheng political prison. When I mention the sinister-looking men at the entrance to his apartment block who asked me to explain why I’ve come to see him, his face cracks into a sly grin.

  ‘I’m contributing to the country by stimulating domestic demand, increasing employment and helping solve the financial crisis,’ he says. He speaks Mandarin with the soft consonants of a southerner and the confidence characteristic of a senior party cadre. ‘You only saw three people down there but if I want to go out I’m followed by three groups – one on foot, one in cars and one on motorbikes. Just think – it takes more than 30 people to keep an eye on me so if the government decided to monitor all 1.3bn people in China we could solve the unemployment problem for the whole world!’

  While this kind of gallows humour and the satirical use of communist propaganda slogans is common on the anonymous internet, I have never heard a senior Chinese official, even a retired one, talk like this in public.

  Bao Tong was born in 1932 in Shanghai, where his father was a clerk in an enamel factory. The young Bao was influenced by two uncles, prominent left-wing intellectuals: one became a professor at Oxford University; the other became famous for a hunger strike aimed at convincing the government of the day to fight the Japanese.

  At high school in Shanghai, Bao met his future wife, Jiang Zongcao, an active member of the communist underground who was kicked out of a string of schools for organizing demonstrations. She convinced him to join the Communist party in 1949, the year it came to power following a bloody civil war. Comrade Bao quickly worked his way up through the communist bureaucracy, but then in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, he was denounced and sent to do hard labour at a re-education farm in Manchuria.

  After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, many previously persecuted officials were politically rehabilitated and Bao was assigned to senior government positions. During the 1980s, he worked as a top aide to premier Zhao Ziyang, a liberal reformer who helped usher in a period of political and economic openness in the 1980s, and in 1987 was appointed to the Communist party’s central committee. He served as the minister in charge of political reform and as political secretary to the standing committee of the Politburo, the five-man group that ran the country at that time.

  One of the first things I notice in his spartan, dimly lit apartment is a large photograph on his bookshelf of Zhao. Only two weeks ago, Zhao’s secret memoir, Prisoner of the State, was published in Hong Kong – a rare first-hand account of Chinese elite politics. Over the next hour, Bao gives me his own blow-by-blow account of the secret and increasingly intense power struggle that raged during the seven weeks of upheaval that ended with tanks rolling down the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing.

  He begins with his verdict: the man who bears full and sole responsibility for ordering the People’s Liberation Army to turn their guns on the people is Deng Xiaoping, the Communist party elder who controlled the leadership from behind the scenes until his death in 1997. Most historians regard Deng as the father of modern China: the architect of its economic reform and opening to the world. But in 1989 his only official title was chairman of the Central Military Commission.

  ‘Most of the students weren’t trying to depose Deng Xiaoping; they were hoping he would carry out reforms,’ Bao says. ‘The problem was Deng felt threatened and he called in the troops. This is how the tragedy happened, a true tragedy in Chinese history.’ Zhao, explains Bao, felt the students’ demands for democracy and an end to corruption were exactly what the Communist party itself claimed to stand for, and that a conciliatory approach would be the best way to end the protests.

  This difference of approach ultimately proved critical. But Zhao’s struggle to avoid sending in the troops ended on 17 May 1989 when, after a state visit to China by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhao’s colleagues in the Politburo forced him to resign. In the middle of the night on 18 May, Zhao made his final, tearful, public appearance in Tiananmen Square, urging students to give up their struggle and return to class.

  In a famous photograph from that night, Wen Jiabao, now premier of China, can be seen standing next to Zhao as he addresses the demonstrators. Bao won’t be drawn on whether Wen was a Zhao sympathizer, as some historians suggest. ‘Who knows if he supported Zhao? Only he knows.’

  His caution reminds me that every word we’re speaking is being recorded and I glance around the room involuntarily, as if I might be able to spot one of the bugs. This line of questioning is not going to do me or my host any good, so I return to 1989
and the days after Zhao’s resignation.

  ‘Many people thought Zhao Ziyang was conspiring to launch a coup against Deng Xiaoping,’ Bao says. ‘In fact, he and I did hatch a “conspiracy” [on the day Zhao was forced to resign], which was to sing the praises of Deng Xiaoping.’ Zhao believed he could avert a massacre by appealing for calm, explaining to the masses why Deng was in charge, despite holding no formal government or Communist party positions.

  Bao was implicated – and later punished – for his alliance with the discredited Zhao. I ask if he regrets not having tried to plot a real coup with Zhao at that point. ‘Some people said Zhao Ziyang could copy Yeltsin and climb up on to a tank, but that,’ says Bao, ‘was impossible: no single soldier would listen to Zhao, they didn’t know him at all. They listened to their officers, the officers listened to the generals and the generals listened to Deng Xiaoping.’ As Mao Zedong famously said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

  Bao describes the night the old men, women and children of Beijing took Thermos flasks to the soldiers and begged them not to enter the city; how ordinary citizens built barricades in the streets to protect the students and how the tanks and troops stormed the city. ‘The tanks were roaring and the bullets were flying into people’s homes. In my building, the son-in-law of a government minister was killed as he was pouring a cup of tea in his living room.’

  I look down at the untouched porcelain teacup on the table in front of me. I’ve been so engrossed I haven’t taken one sip and now I’m not sure if it’s my cup or his. Bao’s vivid description belies the fact he was not in Beijing that night and was not able to piece together the whole story until years later, with the help of smuggled western media cuttings.

  On 28 May 1989, Bao himself was arrested and taken to Qincheng, China’s main political prison since the 1950s. There he became number 8901 – the first prisoner to enter Qincheng in the year 1989 – and was put in a 6m by 6m cement cell with only a stiff wooden board propped on two sawhorses for a bed. ‘I lay down on the board and went to sleep. People ask me why I wasn’t terrified. Before that moment I didn’t know when they would come for me, but now I didn’t need to worry any more.’